{"it":{"id":"EGY-003","kind":"site","sub":"Egypt and Nubia","name":"Colossi of Memnon","place":"Egypt","lat":25.721,"lon":32.611,"date":"They have stood since 1350 BC, and were well known to ancient Greeks and Romans, as…","mat":"earth;granite;sandstone","nfacts":12,"tags":["Egypt"],"sum":"Two seated stone kings, each about 18 m tall with its platform, have watched the Theban plain near Luxor since about 1350 BCE. Each is often estimated at about 720 tonnes; that figure is an estimate, not a weighing. The quartzite was traced to Gebel el-Ahmar near Cairo.\n\nIn Roman times one statue was famous for 'singing' at dawn.","why":"It is a statue that talked for two centuries, and stopped when someone tried to repair it.","src":[300,589],"nsrc":3,"yt":"Strabo suspected someone at the base. Hoax, physics, or both at different times?","rel":["EGY-001","EGY-004"],"hook":"Roman visitors carved over a hundred inscriptions on a Luxor colossus about hearing it cry at dawn."},"S":{"300":["Wikipedia: Colossi of Memnon","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossi_of_Memnon"],"589":["Heizer et al. 1973, The Colossi of Memnon Revisited, Science","https://doi.org/10.1126/science.182.4118.1219"]},"rec":{"id":"EGY-003","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"at el-Gabal el-Ahmar near modern-day Cairo and transported","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"675","u":"km","o":"The statues are made from blocks of quartzite sandstone which was quarried at el-Gabal el-Ahmar (near modern-day Cairo) and transported 675 km overland to Thebes (Luxor).","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Colossi_of_Memnon&oldid=1362692971","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1362692971 (tertiary); 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method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"25.72055556","lon":"32.61055556","src":"Wikidata P625 only + curated wave0 value agrees","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0001 deg (~0.01 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/115780911"},"src":[{"id":"S0284","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Colossi_of_Memnon&oldid=1362692971"},{"id":"S0461","t":"Wikipedia: Colossi of Memnon","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossi_of_Memnon"},{"id":"S2590","t":"Heizer et al. 1973, The Colossi of Memnon Revisited, Science","u":"https://doi.org/10.1126/science.182.4118.1219"},{"id":"VEGY-003-4","t":"Strabo, Geography, BOOK XVII., CHAPTER I., section 46","u":"https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0239%3Abook%3D17%3Achapter%3D1%3Asection%3D46"},{"id":"VEGY-003-5","t":"Geological Survey of Norway, Special Publication 12, pp. 77–85 (PDF)","u":"https://static.ngu.no/upload/Publikasjoner/Special%20publication/SP12_s77-85.pdf"},{"id":"VEGY-003-6","t":"Classical Association of Victoria: Smith (PDF)","u":"https://classicsvic.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/smith.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Strabo, Geography 17.1.46, trans. H. C. Hamilton & W. Falconer (Bohn, 1854–57), vol. III. Project Gutenberg eBook 44886.","u":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44886"},{"id":null,"t":"Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.42.3, trans. W. H. S. Jones (Loeb, 1918). Theoi Classical Texts Library.","u":"https://www.theoi.com/Text/Pausanias1C.html"},{"id":null,"t":"Karl Baedeker, Egypt and the Sûdân: Handbook for Travellers, 7th ed. (Leipzig, 1914), pp. 330–332. Internet Archive.","u":"https://archive.org/details/egyptsdnhand00karl"},{"id":null,"t":"James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, vol. II (Chicago, 1906), §§ 883–884, 917–918. Internet Archive.","u":"https://archive.org/details/ancientrecordsof02brea"},{"id":null,"t":"Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (London, 1877), pp. 635–637. Internet Archive.","u":"https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.92879"},{"id":null,"t":"Giovanni Belzoni, Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries… in Egypt and Nubia (London, 1820), p. 61. Internet Archive.","u":"https://archive.org/details/recentdiscovpyra00belz"}],"sum":"The sound, said the travel writer Pausanias, was like \"a harp or lyre when a string has been broken.\" Others heard the striking of brass, or a whistle, or \"a noise as of a slight blow.\" It came from a broken stone king on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes, always within an hour or two of sunrise, and for about two hundred years it was one of the great attractions of the Roman world. Travellers crossed the river at dawn to be there when it happened. Pausanias wrote that it made him marvel more than anything else.\n\nThe king still sits there, beside his twin, on the plain across the river from modern Luxor. These are the Colossi of Memnon, two seated statues of the pharaoh Amenhotep III of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who have looked east toward the Nile since about 1350 BC. Each rises about 18 metres, roughly the height of a six-storey building, including the stone platform of about 4 metres on which it sits. Each is estimated to weigh around 720 tonnes, and when complete, with its pedestal, each may have stood about 21 metres high and weighed some 750. Those are estimates, not weighings. Their sheer size makes them visible from more than ten miles away. The two stand about 15 metres apart, hands on knees. Small figures of the king's wife Tiye and his mother Mutemwiya are carved against the thrones beside his legs, and the Nile god Hapi appears on the side panels.\n\nThey were never meant to stand alone. They guarded the entrance to Amenhotep's mortuary temple, where he was worshipped as a god on earth, both in his lifetime and after it. It covered some 35 hectares, larger than any temple in the Theban cemetery, larger than the later Ramesseum or Medinet Habu, larger even than Karnak as it stood in his day. His own building inscription, translated by James Henry Breasted, calls it \"an eternal, everlasting fortress of fine white sandstone, wrought with gold throughout,\" \"numerous in royal statues,\" and boasts that \"never has happened the like since the beginning.\" Amenhotep had placed it at the edge of the Nile's floodplain, and the floods took it. An earthquake around 1200 BC, by the reckoning of the Armenian Institute of Seismology, brought most of it down, and the annual inundations gnawed away the rest. Excavations led by the archaeologist Hourig Sourouzian have since shown three great gateways, each fronted by colossal statues. Of the whole boast, the two giants at the door are what survived above ground.\n\nThe stone itself is a feat. Mineral fingerprinting, reported in the journal Science in 1973, traced their quartzite to Gebel el-Ahmar, near modern Cairo. From there it travelled some 675 kilometres to Thebes, and it is believed to have gone overland, because the stones were thought too heavy to carry upstream on the Nile. The traveller Amelia Edwards, writing in 1877, believed each figure was originally \"one solid monolith of grit-stone.\" Today the southern statue is still a single piece. The northern one is not, and that is where the story turns.\n\nIn 27 BC another earthquake shattered the northern colossus, bringing it down from the waist and cracking its lower half. Strabo, the Greek geographer, visited around 20 BC with the Roman prefect Aelius Gallus and found one figure whole and the other broken, \"the effect, it is said, of an earthquake.\" At the first hour of the day he heard the sound. And then the broken statue became a celebrity. The Greeks named it Memnon, after the son of Eos, goddess of the dawn, a hero slain by Achilles at Troy. A stone that cried at dawn seemed to belong to the son of the Dawn. Hearing it was said to bring luck, and the statue gained a reputation as an oracle. Visitors carved their testimony into its legs, and 107 Roman-era inscriptions in Greek and Latin survive, dated between AD 20 and 250, many of them recording whether the writer heard the voice or not. In November 130 the poet Julia Balbilla, travelling with the emperor Hadrian and his wife Sabina, inscribed her own verses there, comparing the sound to struck copper.\n\nThe local people, meanwhile, remembered better than the tourists. Pausanias recorded that the Thebans said the statue was not Memnon at all but \"a native named Phamenoph.\" That is a Greek rendering of Amenhotep.\n\nThe last reliable mention of the sound dates from 196. Some time after that the broken top of the northern statue was rebuilt with five courses of a different sandstone. The date is unknown, though tradition puts it around 199 and gives the credit to the emperor Septimius Severus, who is known to have visited and not heard the voice. After the repair, the statue never spoke again.\n\nThe mainstream explanation is physical, and it fits the facts neatly. After a cold desert night, the first warmth of the sun heated the cracked, porous stone, dew evaporated inside it, and air or fine particles shifted through the crevices, producing a sound. The physicist Sir David Brewster favoured air rushing through cracks as the temperature changed. Similar, rarer sounds have been reported from other Egyptian monuments, most often at Karnak. The strongest argument against a human trick is the ending itself: the sound stopped once new masonry capped the break, probably because the added weight changed how the damaged stone moved and vented.\n\nBut the doubt is as old as the voice. Strabo heard the sound and refused to say where it came from: the base, the broken statue, or \"the people standing around at the base.\" He was \"disposed to believe anything rather than that stones disposed in that manner could send forth sound.\" In the nineteenth century Sir Gardner Wilkinson thought it \"a piece of priestly jugglery,\" and Edwards reported that this was \"the opinion of the majority.\" She also noted a hollow space inside the throne, visible from behind.\n\nWhat remains uncertain is more than the sound. The ancient sources do not even agree on how the statue broke: Strabo heard it was an earthquake, while Pausanias said the king Cambyses had broken it in two. The engineer who raised the colossi is not securely known; a statue inscription once used to credit the official Amenhotep son of Hapu was judged by Breasted to describe a different statue at Karnak. And the voice itself was never recorded in any way that could be tested now. A natural crack might be expected to change slowly, yet the record suggests a clean stop.\n\nSo the colossi leave a puzzle about evidence as much as about stone. Dozens of named witnesses carved their accounts into the statue, Hadrian's court among them, and the first educated visitor doubted his own ears. A broken king sang at dawn for two centuries. An emperor mended him, and he fell silent. Did Rome restore a monument, or end the only experiment that could have told us what was speaking?","qs":["Strabo suspected someone at the base. Hoax, physics, or both at different times?","If a Roman repair silenced the statue, what does that tell us about where the sound came from?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Colossi_of_Memnon_May_2015_2.JPG/1280px-Colossi_of_Memnon_May_2015_2.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Colossi_of_Memnon_May_2015_2.JPG","title":"Colossi of Memnon May 2015 2.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"MusikAnimal","cap":"The Colossi of Memnon in Luxor"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c9/AmenhotepIII_South_Colossus.jpg/1280px-AmenhotepIII_South_Colossus.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AmenhotepIII_South_Colossus.jpg","title":"AmenhotepIII South Colossus.jpg","lic":"CC BY 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","by":"Than217 (talk)Than Ball","cap":"Amenhotep III's Sitting South Colossus"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8c/Ancient_Greek_Graffiti_..._%2836688175375%29.jpg/1280px-Ancient_Greek_Graffiti_..._%2836688175375%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ancient_Greek_Graffiti_..._(36688175375).jpg","title":"Ancient Greek Graffiti ... (36688175375).jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0","by":"Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE","cap":"Colossi of Memnon, Western Bank, Luxor, EGYPT Scanned Slide from August 1985"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/Colossi_of_Memnon.jpg/1280px-Colossi_of_Memnon.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Colossi_of_Memnon.jpg","title":"Colossi of Memnon.jpg","lic":"CC BY 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","by":"Than217 (talk)Than Ball","cap":"Pharaoh Amenhotep III's Sitting Colossi of Memnon statues at Luxor, Egypt."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a8/Colossi_of_Memnon_2022_19.jpg/1280px-Colossi_of_Memnon_2022_19.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Colossi_of_Memnon_2022_19.jpg","title":"Colossi of Memnon 2022 19.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Onceinawhile","cap":"Colossi of Memnon"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"720","u":"t","h":"Each colossus, 18 m tall, is estimated to weigh 720 tons","s":[53]},{"v":"675","u":"km","h":"Quartzite hauled overland from near Cairo to Thebes","s":[53]},{"v":"1350 BC","h":"They have stood since 1350 BC","s":[53]},{"v":"Earth","h":"Made of: Earth, granite, sandstone","s":[53]}],"hs":{"53":["Wikipedia: Colossi of Memnon (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossi_of_Memnon"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/EGY-003.webp","w":1280,"h":853,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Colossi_of_Memnon_May_2015_2.JPG/1280px-Colossi_of_Memnon_May_2015_2.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}